To think the should stop fucking with sugar and replacing it with shit chemicals?

[stellenbosch]

First Capri Sun, now Coco Pops! Stop fucking with recipes!

Yeah, yeah, sugar tax. I'd rather my kids had one thing that was sugary than a bunch of chemicals!

They should still sell the old products. Surely sales will just go down anyway because they now all taste like shit?

What fizzy drinks and cordials can you buy that don’t have artificial sweeteners in them? I’m finding it very difficult

Most of the 'posh' cordials like Bottle Green etc
Roses Lime Cordial
Waitrose, Sainsburys or M&S high juice (be careful, they also do sugar free). Interestingly, Waitrose is the cheapest option here for once.
Fizz you're pretty much limited to Coke, Pepsi, or Ginger Beer, or you could dilute high juice with sparkling water.

OK for buying stuff to drink at home, but if you want a single drink when youre out and about, the choice appears to be coke, pepsi or M&S flavoured water. Sometimes you can get Cawstons(?) but even San Pellegrino has gone over to the dark side, along with just about everything else has artificial sweeteners in.

I agree with natural rather than artificial generally. I am unclear why you think Capri Sun or coco pops are natural when loaded with sugar but suddenly unnatural with added sweetener. Either way they're shit.

The threads on sweeteners are so nuts to me. I haven't noticed sweeteners creeping into anything I buy because I don't buy processed crap.

I went to get some Greek yoghurt yesterday (Fage) and they have stopped marketing their full fat as ‘complete’. They have labelled it 5% fat, because that’s what it is. People see full fat and imagine all sorts of rubbish. It’s sad they have had to do this.

Slighty off topic but i would also like to be able to buy a bloody "full fat" yoghurt!!

If you look really hard you can find full fat natural/greek yoghurt. I buy a big tub of it and then use it to make breakfasts for a week. I smush up 1 or 2 bananas. Add a spoon or two of 100% fruit jam. Mix in a full tub of full fat natural or greek yogurt, half a bag of porridge oats, a cup of milk and half a bag of frozen berries. Leave overnight so the yoghurt "cooks" the porridge. It's unreal. So creamy, delicious and filling.

It does DS and I for breakfast/supper all week. I tend to bung a few more berries on top in the morning just to make it extra fancy. At the moment I'm running through what's left of last year's crop of frozen blackcurrants before I harvest this year's. At night after a work out I eat frozen blackcurrants with a couple of spoons of the yoghurt mixture to cool me down. Or for DS, I freeze portions of it in ice lolly makers so he can eat it as an 'ice-cream' dessert.

To me Stevia tasted ok in coke but like soap when combined with fruit (Schloer and San Pelligrino). All the others just taste slightly wrong whatever they're in.

It's the taste that is my objection.

Hahalofeonce, schools do quite a bit of work on food an nutrition, the trouble is they're peddling the same low fat, replace sugar with sweeteners nonsense as the NHS and government.

The only places to find better quality products are in the higher end supermarkets. There are lots of artificial additive free drinks in Waitrose, but Tesco only sell one type - Belvoir - and that’s often out of stock.

I don’t know why everything needs to be so sweet now anyway. Processed sweet foods that I have bought are usually horrible and cloying.

We’re just buying basic ingredients and making our own stuff now.

Thanks. Fab idea of using sparkling water with cordial.

Yes! I'd rather have a full sugar product occasionally rather than a disgusting tasting artificially sweetened thing everyday. People need to eat less treat foods not continue eating a scrappy diet then blame the foods.
You don't blame the car for crashing you look to the driver for negligence or mistake, food doesn't just leap into our mouths, the eater needs reeducation.

Actually it just occured to me that they are bringing in driver less cars so maybe that's just the way society is going, no one can ever be held accountable for things they blatantly did to themselves, everyone's feelings must be listened too and validated except common sense and self restraint which are obvs verry old fashioned

Or just give up sweet things like coco pops and Capri Sun?

To those who are correctly pointing out that everything is a chemical, of COURSE you are right but I think you may be missing the point slightly. Eating something that occurs naturally in the environment and that we have consumed as humans over thousands of years seems to be a fundamentally better choice than eating something created in a laboratory that is seemingly nutritionally void.

Eating real food has got to be a better choice for your body.

The jury is out on what emulsifiers and sweeteners are doing to our gut biome. I would rather not take the risk.

This is a 'common sense' approach to food but I believe it is correct and will act upon it, despite knowing that everything is technically a chemical.

I buy cheap fizzy water and if I fancy something lemonadey add a teaspoon of sugar and the juice of half a lemon to a glassful.

Kids shouldn't be drinking capri sun anyway- it rots their teeth. Same with sugary cereals.

Oh and DH is adding a splash of pomegranate molasses to his.

Yanbu.
I'm in the small amount of something natural rather than anything of something artificial.

Lol at the thought of coco-pops with refined sugar, colourings, fortified with vitamins etc as being "natural". Think I'll plant some coco-pop plants in the back garden next spring.

malmi

Sucrose is C12H22O11, Glucose is C6H12O6, Saccharin is C7H5O3NS, Aspartame is C13H18O5N2. They're all combinations of Carbon, Hydrogen and Oxygen atoms, plus Nitrogen for Aspartame and also Sulphur for Saccharin. They're all chemicals.

They are all chemicals, in the broadest sense of the word, but the difference is that the human body has, over millions of years, evolved in synergy with sucrose and glucose, but not with aspartame and saccharine.

To the human body, sucrose is a natural product and food source (just as ricin is a natural toxin). However, on the timescale of natural evolution, aspartame will always be a synthetic chemical first discovered in 1965. While the food industry has certified it as 'broadly safe', you cannot say there may be no commercial interests.

I'm a scientist myself with more than a little experience in synthetic organic chemistry, and ultimately I will always choose appropriate quantities of one of the fuels nature has provided for my body over a synthetic chemical.

Plus, artificial sweeteners taste like ass.

Anerak
Yanbu - unfortunately I don't see it change in the UK, especially after Brexit and the adoption of some TTIP like trading agreement with non-EU countries who are even worse at adding chemicals

This made me laugh out loud. I just knew some idiot person would try to blame it on Brexit

I already boycott any product containing palm oil and can tell you that is a lot of products and have recently added anything containing artificial sweeteners which is a pain because the only lemonade I've found without the artificial stuff is from Waitrose which is somewhat further away. I will have to do a bulk order - can't go without my Pimms in this weather

It's not something I notice as I don't drink sweet drinks or eat sugary cereals

I've just bought Belvoir cordial from Asda with my online shop. It doesn't contain artificial sweeteners.

MammaSchwifty

You make valid points regarding these sweetners not being something that humans have consumed as part of our long evolution.

But you're very wrong about one thing: they don't taste bad. When I was young I used to love stealing a Candarel pill from the dispenser. And Pepsi Max Cherry tastes excellent. But natural sugars taste fine to me, too.

I saw in the shop yesterday 90% less sugar chocolate filled with... you guessed it! Sweeteners!

How could anyone eat that crap. If you want chocolate without loads of sugar that bad just buy a good quality dark.

Malmi I agree with you, and your first post made me laugh.
I think we are broadly a bit hysterical about artificial sweeteners and the potential damage they may do.
Isn't sugar the worst of the worst according to latest thinking anyway in terms of the damage it does to arteries etc.?

I search labels for everything.Trying to buy tonic water can be a challenge, I no longer buy any fizzy drinks for myself and will not buy any with sweeteners in for anyone else in the house. I am used to reading labels to avoid basil, cinnamon (side effects) nuts, and palm oil so looking for sweeteners is just another thing to add to the list.

Since sugar became the big evil, I have noticed overweight people a lot more and wonder if sugar has actually made a contribution or whether it is just junk food, eating too much or lack of exercise, or a combination. I have also become more aware of how many people buy large amounts of drinks in this weather, just dumping them in the trolley without looking at what is in them.

Very few people seem to read labels, they just put their shopping in the trolley as I used to before people started messing with our food - starting with adding soya flour to bread to make it cheaper to produce in the 90's, and that can cause digestive issues for some, also see pea flour in bread. If you read the labels on anything these days you probably wouldn't buy it if you knew what it all was. Big thing about E numbers, then butter is bad, then butter is not bad, however butter is now often mixed with mass produced oil and the spreadable butter and olive oil is mixed with palm oil so is actually not good really (crop spraying plus hormones in dairy cattle) now sugar is bad. What next?

They've replaced most of the sugar with glucose syrup in coco pops and are touting it as 30% less sugar!
This is a pet peeve. When labels or companies claim, "No added sugar" but it's got rice syrup and 7 ingredients ending in -ose (indicating it's a form of sugar).
And as for all of the "sugar-free" or alternative sweetener ranges in supermarkets.